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Twentieth-Century art EssayIn 1902 Boccioni left Rome to study the impressionistics in Paris later, in 1904, he colonized for some months in Russia with a family he had known in France. Through a trip to France in the autumn of 1911 Boccioni had become familiar with Cubist techniques. This sensitive experience helped him to achieve a more than autonomous artistic language in which the fragmentation of color was combined with a deeper perception of space. With time Boccioni was evolving an meet of staggering physical power, and explored different means of expression. In his The metropolis Rises of 1910-11 (Fig. 1), a painting of intense ambitiousness, done just at the threshold of his breakthrough into Futurism, it is kinda apparent that he was indebted to Cubist inventions for the depiction of a fractured space and the breaking down of forms across the picture plane. But to this he adds something the Cubists had noticeably shied forward from color the kind which illuminate d and even decomposed forms in Impressionist painting with its resonance and brilliance.According to the art critic, Rosenblum, Boccioni still prolifically utilizes here a modified Impressionist technique whose atomizing effect on mass permits the forceful symbols of dollar and manpower to slip out of their skins in a blur of pitiful light (Rosenblum, 1996). accede 1 Umberto Boccioni The City Rises, 1910-11 Oil on canvas 6 ft 6 1/2 ins x 9 ft 10 1/2 ins Museum of Modern maneuver, New York In this work, painted in a half-naturalistic style and made up of dots and whirling strokes of vibrant color, forms, light and color warming into frenzy of cooccurring activities, each actively pursuing the other for clarity and visual authority.The result is something like visual noise, where each gesture or debased form takes on the personality of a boisterous shout in a turbulent crowd. The artist attempts to express not merely people moving but movement itself and the collective emotion o f the crowd. The relentless activity of The City Rises typified the one of the sides of Boccionis character where the brooding, emotional qualities of an artist were not easily suppressed.In the City Rises against the Milanese urban background of smoking chimneys, scaffolding, a streetcar, and a locomotive, enormous draft horses tug at their harnesses, while street workers attempt to forecast the animals explosive strength. Robert Rosenblum in the book Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art describes pictorial means of realizing this veneration of titanic energies and industrial activity utilized in the painting as anachronous and focuses on the prominent role given to horse power as on a symbol of that anachronism (Rosenblum, 1996, 180).Yet it appears that radical Boccionis sermon of forms within this Cubist space was actually much more conservative than that of his less political friends Picasso and Braque, and he never completely let go of the descriptive character of his work. On th e other hand, Boccioni was at some pains to distinguish his movement from that of Cubism. As he saw it, the Cubists were merely projecting as simultaneous onto the plane of the canvas the sequence of aspects from which the object was viewed, whereas the planes of Futurism emanate from the dynamic interior of desolidified objects (Antliff, 2000, 722).When war was declared, he, like many of his Futurist comrades, immediately enlisted and joined the Lombard Cyclists Brigade. After unmindful pause he returned to military service and shortly after was accidentally thrown from his horse during the cavalry training exercise and died following day, aged 33 (Osborn, 2001). It is so ironic that a Futurist should have met his death by being thrown from a horse, when his propagating of speed and dynamism would have recommended a more suitable vehicle, like an automobile or an airplane. Even more ironic seems the fact that the horse was a kind of leitmotiv of Boccionis art.In The City Rises imm ense flamboyant horses energize the foreground while some rather poky buildings rise in the background. It is with reference to the horse that Boccioni explains the principles of Futurism. A running horse does not have four legs, he writes in Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting, It has twenty, and their movements are triangular. (Boccioni et al. ) And perhaps the greatest irony of all was the artists welcome embrace of the First World War as a cleansing of culture. However, with the horrors of the First World War, Futurism died too.Works Cited Antliff, Mark. The Fourth Dimension and Futurism A Politicized Space. The Art Bulletin v. 82 no. 4 (2000) 720-33. Boccioni, Umberto, et al. Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting. 1910 http//www. unknown. nu/futurism/techpaint. html (accessed April 12, 2007).Osborn, Bob. The Pre-Futurist Years. Futurism and the Futurists. http//futurism. org. uk/boccioni/boccframes. htm (accessed February 25, 2007) Rosenblum, Robert. Cubism and Twent ieth-Century Art. New York Harry N. Abrams, 1966 Taylor, Joshua C. Boccioni. New York Double Company, Inc, 1961.